Tom Coult’s distinctive voice comes through vividly on this celebration of his time at the BBC Philharmonic – he wrote three of these four works as the orchestra’s composer in association, with only the 2015 song cycle Beautiful Caged Thing predating this. Sung with relish by Anna Dennis and conducted by Andrew Gourlay, it demonstrates Coult’s ability to write music that’s texturally rich yet strikingly translucent.
That’s true whether he’s writing for voice or for violin, as we hear in his 2021 concerto Pleasure Garden, conducted by Elena Schwarz with Daniel Pioro the eloquent soloist. Then there’s After Lassus, again gleamingly sung by Dennis: a homage to the Renaissance composer that begins with Swingle-ish vocalisations and includes a louche cabaret-style movement. It brings to mind the way Mahler used Austrian country dances in his music, creating rootedness and a benign melancholy.
Indeed, the last of 2023’s Three Pieces That Disappear, conducted here by Martyn Brabbins, at first seems to hover somewhere between Mahler’s Ninth and Purcell. Coult then weaves in a 1951 recording of Schoenberg’s Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra, itself based on Handel. That’s a lot of nostalgia for one piece. Yet the result is characteristically moving and never overwritten. These aren’t pieces that disappear, not at all.
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